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The feverish fascination around Donald Trump is atavistic. Deep down, we’re all prehistoric people.
Our bodies and our minds were built by evolution during the Pleistocene Epoch. Our body evolved to run around every day on the plains of the savanna, not sit in a chair endlessly staring at a screen. There is a mismatch between our prehistoric default settings and our modern way of life.
Evolutionary psychology contends the same is true about our minds. Our desire to be fair and egalitarian wrestles with our much older tribalism. Our scientific objectivity vies with our melodramatic tendencies.
Trump continues to inspire his base and enrage his enemies because he accentuates the mismatch inside our minds. For his base, Trump heroically cuts through bureaucratic alienation, Washington elitism and the impersonal values of cosmopolitanism. But because those on the left do not understand Trump’s pre-modern appeal, they continue to inadvertently make him stronger by trying to thwart him with red tape. Even the legal cases against Trump read like an attack of the procedural peccadillos.
Anthropologists call Trump-style leadership “Big Man” politics, and this system of power goes way back in human history and can be observed all over the globe. Using wealth, charisma or religion, a man becomes chief among his clan and trades his protection, affiliation and influence for more wealth, allegiance and power.
Anthropologist James Frazer showed that many world religions enshrine the Big Man as a “God-King.” Personal eccentricities only help the Big Man gain and hold power because he is not a cog in a machine but a radical individual boldly violating social norms and “protecting his team.” He projects himself as a dominant fighter, not a conciliatory figure. He looks Machiavellian in the true sense that Niccolo Machiavelli meant it — namely, the leader does anything for his tribe.
None of this may be true of Trump — I leave it to the reader to decide if he would actually raise a finger for his tribe. But his fans and devotees certainly perceive him as the Big Man. And in politics, perception is reality. A self-aggrandizing Big Man hijacks our natural prehistoric emotions of loyalty and esteem, and we begin to see ourselves as part of an alpha-led persecuted tribe with adversaries at the gates.
[ Editorial: The latest indictment of Trump really is about a threat to democracy ]
Surprisingly, I am not trying to denigrate Trumpism by describing its power dynamic. Sometimes, prehistoric tendencies are still very useful and valuable. Yes, we live in big anonymous nation-states governed by impersonal laws, but we also live in personal communities where we need to scrap for resources and protect our own families. The archaic past and the modern live side by side inside our minds. Sometimes, we need a modern response of cool impersonal rationality, and other times, we need an old emotional tribal response. One is not intrinsically better. It depends on the environment or the context.
Many of us are alienated and exasperated by the bureaucratic state’s failed attempts to handle education, health care, crime, commerce and justice. We long for a world of exceptional characters, purposes and agents. The reason why many of us love “The Godfather,” “The Sopranos” and so on is because we get to see powerful people skirt the law to get stuff done for their families: Enemies get punished, wealth is obtained and scores get settled.
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How does a Big Man get toppled? He doesn’t usually get whittled away by lawsuits and rationality. We all know that an accountant finally got mobster Al Capone, but that won’t work with a politician who got 47% of the 2020 vote. Economists describe a common response to the Big Man known as the “coalition of losers.” In our hunter-gatherer past and in contemporary social groups, many less powerful people gang up on the aggrandizer and take away power. In some societies, coalitions of losers can keep a despotic Big Man from ruining the collective good. It’s possible that fighting a steady stream of indictments will slowly drain Trump’s fortune and reduce his power. But more often with a Big Man, something melodramatic and mythopoetic happens.
In our prehistoric mode, power, not policy, unseats entrenched power. Concentrated power gets transferred in a dramatic battle, and our media-driven democratic version of battle will be campaign rallies and debates. If the coalition of losers fails, the Big Man is usually toppled by a Bigger Man (or Bigger Woman) or a revolution of the base. A Bigger Man can be a louder and more aggressive aggrandizer or a secret Big Man — a quiet-talking but skillful David to Goliath.
But as Frazer famously describes in “The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion,” once the devotees of a Big Man have deified him, he cannot be seen to gradually weaken like a normal human. No decline or enfeeblement of personal strength can be tolerated. That in large part is why some of Trump’s base cannot acknowledge his 2020 loss. In a true cult of personality, the devotees themselves turn on the Big Man as soon as he shows symptoms of personal decline and failure, and as Frazer puts it, “His soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay.” No “vigorous successor” appears on the horizon yet.
Trump does not appear to be suffering the cognitive or motor deficits we’re seeing in President Joe Biden, so his devotees will not abandon him anytime soon. It’s possible that Republicans will lose the coming election because a conservative Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in a deeply unpopular decision. But using procedural violations and red tape tactics against Trump will have the opposite impact on his power. His growing campaign coffers prove this.
In the coming year, brace yourselves for some primordial politics. The cult of the Big Man has its own prehistoric logic.
Stephen Asma is a professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago. He is the author of 10 books and is the co-host with actor Paul Giamatti of the podcast “Chinwag.”
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